The role of inhibitory control in garden-path sentence processing: A Chinese-English bilingual perspective
This research addresses how cognitive control mechanisms influence language processing in bilinguals, offering incremental insights into existing models.
This study investigated the role of inhibitory control in resolving misinterpretations in garden-path sentences among Chinese-English bilinguals, finding that inhibitory control does not affect recovery in Chinese but shows a complex interaction with language proficiency in English, where low-proficiency learners with high inhibitory control exhibited lingering misinterpretations.
In reading garden-path sentences, people must resolve competing interpretations, though initial misinterpretations can linger despite reanalysis. This study examines the role of inhibitory control (IC) in managing these misinterpretations among Chinese-English bilinguals. Using self-paced reading tasks, we investigated how IC influences recovery from garden-path sentences in Chinese (L1) and its interaction with language proficiency during English (L2) processing. Results indicate that IC does not affect garden-path recovery in Chinese, suggesting reliance on semantic context may reduce the need for IC. In contrast, findings for English L2 learners reveal a complex relationship between language proficiency and IC: Participants with low L2 proficiency but high IC showed lingering misinterpretations, while those with high proficiency exhibited none. These results support and extend the Model of Cognitive Control (Ness et al., 2023). Moreover, our comparison of three Stroop task versions identifies L1 colour-word Stroop task as the preferred measure of IC in bilingual research.